QA Wolf exits stealth with an end-to-end service for software testing

QA Wolf, a cloud-based platform designed to detect bugs in software, today exited stealth and announced a $20 million funding round led by Inspired Capital with participation from Notation Capital, Operator Partners and Thiel Capital and several angel investors (among them Peter Thiel). CEO Jon Perl tells TechCrunch that the new cash will go toward expanding QA Wolf’s engineering team as well as ongoing sales and marketing efforts.

“As software developers ourselves — working in health tech and fintech, where even minor bugs could have an outsized impact on people’s lives — we know firsthand how critical robust end-to-end testing is for all software businesses,” Perl said. “Our vision is to become the ‘operating system for quality’ that companies use to improve the holistic quality of their applications, beginning with automated end-to-end testing.”

Perl argues that one of the most complex challenges in building software today is the cost — the people, time, infrastructure cost — to test code from an end user’s perspective. Indeed, Statista found that organizations spent around 23% of their annual IT budgets on quality assurance and testing between 2012 and 2019. Perl says most companies either hire testers who are paid a pittance to review software manually or use software-as-a-service solutions that have a high technical barrier to entry. Neither, obviously, are very desirable scenarios.

But wait, you might say — automated software testing platforms already exist in abundance. There’s Waldo for smartphone apps, Autify for both mobile and the web, and LambdaTest, to name a few. Some newer vendors’ approaches are quite novel, like Mobot’s, which relies on fleets of robots built to bug-test apps.

But Perl makes the case that QA Wolf removes the complexity of quality assurance testing like few others do. That’s because customers get support along the way, including help developing a test plan, writing and maintaining tests, investigating failures, and reporting bugs.

“No matter how big or how small a company is, development teams usually lack the expertise and time to write, run and maintain end-to-end tests in-house,” Perl said. “Knowing that, the market responded by creating lightweight tools that simplify the job or even enable non-technical people to develop test cases. While those tools definitely help, they’re attempting to solve the wrong problem. The fundamental problem is that the industry still treats test coverage as something to build, rather than something to buy.”

QA Wolf

Image Credits: QA Wolf

Perl founded QA Wolf in 2019 with the goal of changing that, bringing on co-founders Laura Cressman and Scott Wilson. Perl was previously the head of technology at home service booking platform Dispatch and the CTO of pharmacy supply chain firm Zipdrug. Cressman was a senior software engineer at Cityblock Health, a healthcare company spun out of Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs, while Wilson was an account manager at Amazon before joining Wyze Labs — his most recent employer prior to QA Wolf — as a director of growth marketing.

At a high level, QA Wolf integrates with companies’ existing internal systems to give a real-time view of their software’s performance. Clients submit a short demo of their app, which QA Wolf uses to build a testing plan and begin coding automated test suites. The platform supports most any software app accessible via the web, including those that leverage third-party services like Stripe and Salesforce.

As QA Wolf builds out test coverage, it works with clients to help build tests into their processes and address problems with tests as they crop up. Perl notes that tests are written in Playwright, an open source testing package, allowing them to be migrated to other platforms if customers so wish.

“QA Wolf solves both problems with our technology and people approach, and a business model that incentivizes high performing and accurate testing,” Perl said. “For executives and technical leaders, QA Wolf ensures that their customers are getting the best possible user experience — free of bugs — for a fraction of the cost of how QA was historically done.”

QA Wolf promises a lot. But in a sign that it’s delivering on at least some of those assurances, the 45-person startup already has more than 50 customers, including early-stage ventures like Vividly, Minno and Worksome. Perl declined to reveal revenue figures, but he said that he expects QA Wolf’s workforce to grow to 60 employees by the end of the year as new clients come online.

Perl claims that QA Wolf will continue to differentiate in the future by building datasets of tests across web apps, which will allow it to develop new products and services on top of what the company already offers.

“Through economies of scale, QA Wolf’s capabilities will only become more powerful, enabling us to deliver high test coverage at an even lower cost than in-house or outsourced alternatives,” he said, stressing that QA Wolf is in stable shape compared to the larger microenvironment for young startups. “The pandemic has been a positive for us by shortening sales cycles with the shift to Zoom … In terms of the broader slowdown in tech, so far we have not seen a slowdown in growth and had our biggest week ever for new sales last week. Our revenue has gone up 25x over the past year and business has doubled in the last 6 months alone.”

QA Wolf exits stealth with an end-to-end service for software testing by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

OneSignal lands $50M to automatically optimize SMS, in-app and email campaigns

OneSignal, a platform that powers notifications for mobile apps and more, today announced that it raised $50 million in a Series C round led by BAM Elevate with participation from SignalFire and other existing investors. The infusion brings OneSignal’s total raised to $80 million and will be used to make investments in machine learning, geographic expansion, and growing OneSignal’s team (from 140 employees to 170) by the end of the year.

Beginning as a mobile game studio, OneSignal pivoted to customer engagement when co-founder and CEO George Deglin saw an opportunity to address a perennial challenge in app development: creating an effective push notification pipeline.

“There is a huge shift happening in the mobile app industry. Technology and regulatory changes have made advertising less effective and more expensive by making it harder to target ads on platforms like Facebook. As a result, companies are shifting their focus from paid advertising channels like Facebook Ads to ‘owned channels’ like push notifications, emails, and in-app messages,” Deglin told TechCrunch via email. “Despite this recent shift, most of the technology that’s available to help brands engage with users on owned channels was not built for a mobile-centric world.”

By contrast, Deglin asserts, OneSignal is mobile-centric, with tools designed to let businesses automate the delivery of messages across channels, including SMS, email, and app notifications and in-app messages. OneSignal customers can centralize user communications within the platform, customizing their campaigns based on metrics to improve open rates.

There’s truth to the notion that customized, personalized messages can move product. According to a 2021 McKinsey survey, 76% of consumers said that receiving personalized communications was a key factor in prompting their consideration of a brand, while 78% said such content made them more likely to repurchase.

“OneSignal was founded by Long Vo and I in 2015. Long and I were running a Y Combinator-backed game studio but pivoted it into a push notification platform [and then a customer engagement solution] after discovering how hard it was for developers to communicate with their users,” Deglin said. “Prior to their meeting, I was the co-founder and CTO of Uversity, a student engagement platform. Long Vo was co-founder and art director of Gaia Online, an anime-themed social network. We were introduced through a mutual friend who thought we would be great co-founders for each other.”

OneSignal

Image Credits: OneSignal

OneSignal competes with Braze, CleverTap, and Xtremepush, among others. Braze is a publicly traded company, having raised around $175 million when private, while CleverTap most recently bagged $105 million in funding at a $775 million valuation. But Deglin argues that OneSignal differentiates itself by focusing on “intelligent delivery,” or analyzing the time and day users engage with an app and automatically scheduling “re-engagement” campaigns to be delivered based on the historical trends.

“By providing these types of automatic personalizations, OneSignal enables its customers to focus on building great apps and saves them time and guesswork that they would otherwise spend trying to determine the best time or frequency to send their messages,” Deglin added. “Just as smartphones are getting better at making recommendations based on how people use them, OneSignal sees an opportunity to democratize technology for all app developers to optimize their messaging campaigns to provide more personalized experiences to their users.”

Indeed, OneSignal has grown quite large, with over 1.7 million developers and marketers on the platform and roughly 6,000 paying customers. One accelerant has been OneSignal’s freemium plan, Deglin says, which limits certain features but doesn’t cap the number of users or messages that customers can send push notifications to.

“OneSignal has rapidly grown during the pandemic as more businesses recognized the importance of keeping their customers engaged, and increasing retention, with push notifications and emails … The company has also benefited from changes in the advertising ecosystem that have made it more costly to acquire users and, therefore, even more important to maximize user retention,” Deglin said. “OneSignal was well prepared for economic headwinds and has continued to grow quickly while not overspending. This round allows OneSignal to reach profitability while maintaining rapid growth … Efficiency has been a focus for the business and gross margins are over 90%.”

BAM Elevate’s Jamie McGurk, who’s joining OnSignal’s board of directors, told TechCrunch in a statement: “Today’s users expect hyper-personalized, relevant, and timely communication across every touchpoint. Creating a multichannel communication strategy is a must and OneSignal allows you to do this quickly and easily. It’s an honor to join the OneSignal team and I’m looking forward to working with George and the rest of the leadership team to continue on the great progress the company has made.”

CodeSee’s latest product helps organizations visualize their code base

As code bases grow ever larger, it becomes increasingly difficult for anyone to understand how the work they are doing fits in with the big picture, where the service dependencies are and how the code flows. CodeSee, an early stage startup, wants to provide developers and teams with the ability to see the big picture view of the code, a kind of Google Maps for code, and today it released its first commercial product, CodeSee Enterprise.

The product builds on the open source project the startup released last year called OSS Port. The initial product was designed to help visualize code in open source projects, and company co-founder and CEO Shanea Leven reports the community around the open source project has grown to more than 10,000 members. Starting with an open source project and building a strong community is a good base on which to build a commercial company.

While the community version will remain free for open source projects and private repos with up to three collaborators, the new enterprise product builds on that initial offering, providing larger groups of developers and enterprises with the kinds of features they need.

“Our enterprise product builds on the community version by providing an unlimited number of users for our code automation feature. Plus, it enables developers to visualize service boundaries, which is something that we’re incredibly excited about,” Leven told TechCrunch. In fact, she said that it was one of the feature requests they heard about most in the soft beta of the commercial product. Companies were hungry for a way to visualize how the the various micro services in a code base interact.

CodeSee Service map

CodeSee Service Map Image Credits: CodeSee

“Using CodeSee, we can tell you where services are being consumed in the code, which is a huge visibility problem when it comes to service oriented architecture and micro services. [Developers] have no idea how these services are talking to one another, where they’re located in the code or how they’re being consumed. And we can show that now,” she said.

She said the idea is that some of the people using OSS Port for side projects will want to bring the tool to their day jobs inside organizations, and the goal is to provide a consistent experience. “We want to ensure that developers using OSS Port, who work at [larger] companies have access to the same tools in a corporate code base that they would for the open source repos,” she said.

In addition to providing a visual overview of the code base and the service dependencies visualization, CodeSee can also help enforce governance rules around interacting with the code and also enables companies who require it to keep the map on private servers.

The company was founded in 2019 and has raised $10 million dollars, including a $7 million secondary seed in January. CodeSee Enterprise is available starting today.

Sofy raises cash to grow its no-code mobile app testing platform

Sofy, a startup developing a testing platform for mobile app devs it claims is used by Microsoft, today closed a $7.75 million seed round that brings its total capital raised to $9.5 million. Voyager Capital led the tranche with participation from PSL Ventures, GTMFund and Revolution, providing cash that CEO Syed Hamid says will be put toward supporting Sof’s general growth and R&D.

Sofy was co-launched in 2016 by Hamid, Hyder Ali and Usman Zubair. Prior to it, Syed was an engineering leader at Microsoft for nearly two decades. Ali also spent the bulk of his career at Microsoft, while Zubair — another Microsoft veteran — has several startups under his belt besides Sofy, including Enfoundery, a tech consultancy for entrepreneurs.

“Software testing hasn’t changed in the past 40 years. It’s still done manually with significant cost of creation and maintenance,” Hamid told TechCrunch in an email interview. “The time is right with advancements in machine learning and AI to evolve to a modern no-code testing process and intelligent automation.”

Sofy validates changes in app code directly from existing dev environments. Delivering insights that spotlight issues in the code, Sofy tries to account for different devices and operating systems on which the code might run, recording metrics like speed and responsiveness as well as vulnerability to cyberattacks.

Sofy

Image Credits: Sofy

“We have a dataset of over 17,000 publicly available mobile apps to enhance our no-code platform and improve the resilience and efficiency of applications. We are able to run automation on thousands of different device matrices,” Hamid said.

Developers might balk at Sofy’s analytics capabilities, which attempt to quantify dev “performance and productivity.” But Hamid pitches them as a net good because, in his eyes, they can lead to faster release cycles.

“There are [major] benefits for the C-suite … By releasing apps faster, it has a bottom-line impact on the organization, decreasing the engineering cost significantly,” Hamid said. “Sofy helps organizations deliver apps of higher quality and greater innovation, providing a better experience for their customers.”

Sofy goes head-to-head with companies like BrowserStack, which offers a similar testing platform for apps. Autify and Waldo also compete in the space. But Sofy will look to stay ahead of the competition with new features, Hamid says, including the ability to test apps for augmented and virtual reality peripherals.

Sofy’s current customer base stands at 45 companies, although Hamid notes that teams at roughly 2,500 companies use the service. The startup plans to expand its headcount by the end of the year, growing from 35 employees to 75.

Superblocks secures $37M to help companies build and maintain internal apps

The economic downturn prompted a hiring slowdown across the tech industry, forcing CTOs — and the teams that they manage — to do more with less. It’s particularly put the microscope on developers where it concerns efficiency. Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently said that productivity is “not where it needs to be,” while Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg upped performance goals to weed out employees he believes “shouldn’t be [there].”

A decent chunk of developers’ time is spent on internal tooling, including building admin dashboards, report-generating systems and data pipelines. And it’s here where there’s a meaningful opportunity to cut down on repetitive, manual programming work, according to Brad Menezes. He’s the CEO of Superblocks, a recently launched platform that provides building blocks to create custom internal apps, workflows and scheduled jobs.

The data is a bit hard to come by, but — to Menezes’s point — internal tools appear to cost companies a lot of time and resources. Retool, a Superblocks competitor, found in a recent survey that developers spend more than 30% of their time building internal apps. Interestingly, the respondents said that the pandemic led to an increase in time spent on internal tools, perhaps because employers had to quickly adjust their tech stacks to remote and hybrid work setups.

“As developers ourselves, my cofounder, Ran Ma, and I faced the pain of building internal tools over and over at every company we worked at, and came to realize that the fundamental building blocks are largely the same,” Menezes told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Software is eating every business process, and custom internal software has become incredibly expensive to build, arduous to maintain and difficult to secure. We built Superblocks to free developers from spending time on time-intensive custom internal tooling infrastructure so that they can focus entirely on the user experience … unique to their business.”

Prior to co-founding Superblocks, Menezes was a lead product manager at Yelp and senior director of product management at Datadog, as well as an angel investor in enterprise startups at Sequoia. Ma was previously a senior engineer at Morgan Stanley before co-founding Supportive, a help desk software-as-a-service startup, and joining Confluent as an engineering lead.

Superblocks

Image Credits: Superblocks

True to its dev-simplifying mission, Superblocks delivers tools to build apps, workflows and jobs connected to enterprise data sources. Using a drag-and-drop interface, users can build apps like database admin panels and order management screens with business logic (e.g., “When a new support ticket is created, send it to Slack”), integrating data from databases, internal APIs and elsewhere.

Scheduled jobs in Superblocks execute every minute, hour, day, week or month to automate tasks like emailing reports, while apps created with the platform can be monitored with existing tools like Datadog and Grafana. Workflows can be programmed to trigger automations when customers take actions in-app, such as tapping on an alert.

“CTOs are always looking for ways to allocate more engineering time towards their differentiated customer-facing product, but often get pulled back into internal tooling because it’s the only way for operations to scale with business growth. As developers’ salaries rise and customer support costs grow to meet ever-increasing customer expectations, the cost of building, maintaining and securing internal apps is at an all time high,” Menezes said. “Superblocks is an accelerant for building internal apps.”

Certainly, expenses are a concern for companies with lots of internal tooling. According to Retool’s back-of-the-envelop math, the cost of maintaining internal apps can exceed $8.2 million a year for a company with over 1,000 employees. That’s because more than half of companies have at least one full-time employee dedicated to building and maintaining internal tools, Retool data shows — and developer salaries run high.

But just because a company seeks out a faster, cheaper way doesn’t mean that they’ll choose Superblocks. Rivals include Appsmith, Snapboard, and Airplane. Several have substantial venture backing; the aforementioned Retool raised $45 million at a $3.2 billion valuation in July.

Menezes says he thinks about the competitive landscape in three ways: build-it-yourself, legacy incumbents and low-code startups. Legacy incumbents necessarily have large professional services teams to configure on-prem software, while startups, he argues, are largely focused on business users as opposed to developers.

“Superblocks [allows] much greater customization, performance and integrations with business systems,” Menezes said. “In today’s macroeconomic environment, with the tech industry facing a hiring slowdown in recent months, the business has only accelerated as organizations scramble to increase developer efficiency resulting in thousands of apps, workflows and jobs growing over 30% month over month.”

Superblocks

Image Credits: Superblocks

Superblocks — which offers both a fully managed service and a hybrid model with open source, self-hosted packages — claims to have “hundreds” of customers, including Motive, Payhawk, Clearco, Papaya Global and Alchemy, who Menezes says are most frequently using the platform to automate customer support operations. Investors were evidently encouraged by the financials, which Menezes declined to disclose — Superblocks today closed a $37 million funding round from Kleiner Perkins, Greenoaks, Spark and Meritech as well as the co-founders and founders of Airtable, Twilio, Okta, Confluent, Firebase, Instacart, Fivetran, Box, Yelp and DocuSign.

“The recent market volatility has caused a hiring slowdown across the tech industry, forcing CTOs to achieve more with less. This has caused a refocus on developer efficiency which is driving enormous demand for Superblocks, especially in operationally intensive businesses,” Menezes continued. “This … fundraise enables us to invest in products to meet the immense customer demand we’re seeing. We will invest deeply into our core products, launch new ones and continue to invest in our world-class engineering support that our customers rave about.”

FullStory secures $25M to help companies spot issues in their apps and websites

FullStory, which sells analytics tools for apps and websites, secured $25 million in new equity financing, paperwork filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission this week shows. TechCrunch couldn’t independently confirm the investors and the company hadn’t responded to a request for comment as of press time. But according to Crunchbase, the infusion is FullStory’s first since August 2021, and brings the company’s total raised to around $200 million.

Atlanta-based FullStory was founded in 2014 by Bruce Johnson, Joel Webber and Scott Voigt, who sought to build a product that helps brands create better customer experiences across the web and mobile. Prior to launching FullStory, the co-founders — all Georgia Institute of Technology graduates — teamed in the early 2000s to start a DevOps company called Innuvo, which was acquired by Google in 2005 for an undisclosed sum.

Originally conceived as a marketing tool, FullStory pivoted to analytics, customer success and engineering after the co-founders realized that the tooling they created to figure out why their initial idea wasn’t working had commercial potential.

Today, FullStory collects and structures digital experience data and uses AI to glean insights from behaviors. The platform tracks signals like highlights, scroll depths, pinch-to-zoom frequency and copy-and-paste, showing metrics and reconstructing a user’s journey with vector-based graphics. FullStory can also search through a range of possible “friction events” to see how often they correlate with a failure to convert (i.e., complete a desired goal, like making purchases). Saved reports and automated alerts, meanwhile, track progress and spotlight anomalies like when a click leads nowhere because of a blip in a JavaScript snippet.

FullStory claims its approach provides an easy way to understand if a customer is, for example, comparison shopping or simply performing a search. In a previous interview, Voigt said a home improvement vendor used FullStory to identify a spike in the sale of garage mats during the pandemic and update its marketing materials accordingly.

FullStory

A glimpse at FullStory’s digital customer experience monitoring dashboard.

The digital transformation efforts spurred by the pandemic have been a boon for FullStory, which currently has over 3,200 customers including Groupon, Automattic, Peloton, Fidelity and JetBlue. In 2021, the company — who’s gotten backing from VCs including Permira, Kleiner Perkins, GV, Stripes, Dell Technologies Capital and Salesforce Ventures — claims to have increased annual recurring revenue by over 70% year over year.

FullStory claims it analyzed more than 15 billion user sessions in 2021, including nearly 1 trillion clicks, text highlights and scrolls.

“As people manage more of their work and personal lives online, companies across industries have embraced FullStory for the insights they need to deliver premium digital products and experiences,” Voigt said in a recent press release. “FullStory’s comprehensive DXI platform provides a unique view of real user behavior and surfaces the ‘unknown unknowns’ to drive product analytics, UX research, conversion optimization, and more.”

Building differentiated digital experiences is plainly challenging. Fifty-eight percent of customers believe most brands’ experiences have little to no impact on what they end up buying and nearly half can’t tell the difference between experiences, according to a Gartner poll. Part of the problem lies with the C-suite, which continues to push for digital experiences without thorough bug testing and fully understanding what would motivate their customers to try them.

Dead links, glitches and unsubmittable forms can litter companies’ apps and websites. Not only do these present barriers to work and leisure, they can lead to overwhelmed customer service teams, staff shortages and hours-long wait times. Customers rarely forgive — 64% admit to having jumped to a competitor following a poor customer experience.

The demand for more thoughtful deployments has benefited not only FullStory but its rivals in the digital customer experience analytics space, like Clootrack. Glassbox and Decibel are perhaps the most formidable, having raised tens of millions in venture capital between them.

Keen to set the pace (or at the least maintain it), FullStory expanded its leadership team in 2021, hiring Edelita Tichepco as CFO and Google veteran Jim Miller as VP of recruitment. Will Schnabel also joined the company as SVP of alliances and partnerships, bringing experience in forging partnerships and integrations from his time at Accenture and IBM Watson.

FullStory also more than doubled its headcount in 2021 to over 500 employees, with teams around the globe including San FranciscoLondonSydney, and Singapore beyond Atlanta. 

Stark wants to make it easier to design accessible websites and software

Stark is a startup that wants to help designers make the software and websites more accessible for people with disabilities, and they’ve created a set of tools that plug into popular design tools and browsers to help.

Cat Noone, co-founder and CEO at Stark, says she and her co-founder and CTO Michael Fouquet launched the company out of a desire to simplify accessible design. “Stark has a very big mission to make the world’s software accessible for everyone. And we help companies supercharge accessibility from months to minutes with a very simple end-to-end workflow,” Noone told TechCrunch.

Today, the company announced a $6 million seed investment along with the release of a suite of tools to make it easier for individuals and teams to build accessible designs.

She says they do this through automated intelligent analysis and by providing seamless fixes for both design and code as part of the process. The Stark Suite of tools is trying to make it easy for designers to build accessibility into their designs by plugging directly into popular design tools including Figma, Sketch and Adobe XD, and popular browsers including Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Opera and Brave.

Designers can check for elements like font size, color choices, contrast, and alt text, among other things, and look for the most accessible choices, making accessibility part of the design process. Noone says that at least 1.5 billion people in the world report having at least one disability. She sees making software and websites accessible, not only a fairness issue, but also one that increasingly involves compliance, with a growing body of accessibility regulations, not unlike security or privacy.

“Accessibility is not a small problem. It’s part of what we call a company’s internal PSA – privacy, security, accessibility – and accessibility [stands] right alongside privacy and security as one of these three major issues in software development that’s been ignored,” she said.

Benedikt Lehnert, Stark’s chief design office, who previously held design roles at SAP and Microsoft, says the company is trying to make accessible design available to designers wherever they are working, which he sees as a major difference between his company’s offering and other similar products, which tend to cover only website accessibility.

“Stark empowers software teams to design, build and test accessible products of all sorts, whether those are marketing websites, SaaS products, mobile apps or any other software,” he said.

He added, “It’s a suite of tools, and when you buy into the Stark ecosystem the whole philosophy is that we hook into the tools that your product team is already using, whether you’re the designer, developer, project manager or QA expert, and stitch them together into an accessibility workflow,” he said.
Today, the company has four pricing tiers, starting with a free offering along with paid tiers for pros, teams and enterprises.

The founders originally conceived of the idea in 2017, and formed the company officially in 2020. They raised a pre-seed round that same year, and closed the $6 million seed round earlier this year.

The startup currently has 18 employees in a distributed team, and plans to be conservative when it comes to hiring, letting the market guide them. Noone says from a diversity perspective, a company that is aiming to make software and websites more accessible has to be open to hiring people with disabilities.

“Here at Stark a majority of the team is disabled. I’m a female founder, but I’m also a disabled CEO, and a majority of the people on the team have some form of at least one disability, and we’re all very open about it. It’s something that we don’t we don’t shy away from. We lean into it,” she said. And it helps them build a better product.

The $6 million seed investment was led by Uncork Capital with help from Darling Ventures, Indicator Ventures and a variety of industry angels.

Nightfall raises cash for its AI that detects sensitive data across apps

Nightfall AI, a startup providing cloud data loss prevention services, today announced that it raised $40 million in Series B financing from investors including WestBridge Capital, Venrock, Bain Capital Ventures and — for some reason — athletes and celebrities including Paul Rudd, Drew Brees and Josh Childress. CEO Isaac Madan says that the proceeds will be put toward doubling Nightfall’s 60-person headcount, scaling the platform to more customers and markets, and expanding Nightfall’s partner ecosystem.

Madan founded Nightfall in 2018 alongside CTO Rohan Sathe. Isaac was previously a VC investor at Venrock, where he focused on early-stage investments in software as a service, security and machine learning. Rohan was one of the founding engineers at Uber Eats, where he designed and built software to grow the platform’s footprint.

Madan says he and Sathe were inspired to launch Nightfall by Sathe’s personal experiences with data breaches arising from poor “data security hygiene.” Sathe was at Uber in 2016 when a developer committed credentials to a private code repository on GitHub, leading a hacker to extract Uber rider and driver data to a public storage service.

“This breach made it clear that attackers will eventually find ways into private applications, so it’s crucial to ensure strong data security hygiene to minimize risk once a bad actor gets in,” Madan told TechCrunch in an email Q&A. “Digital transformation and the shift to a hybrid workplace has eroded the traditional corporate perimeter as it’s no longer guaranteed that employees are on managed devices and networks. This has led to the proliferation of cloud applications that house data that is completely opaque to security teams and increases the attack surface area.”

Nightfall AI

Image Credits: Nightfall AI

Nightfall’s platform monitors data flowing into and out of apps like Slack, Salesforce, Google Drive, Confluence and Jira, which machine learning algorithms classify as sensitive, personally identifiable (PII), noncompliant (with regulations like HIPAA and GDPR), or safe to share. From a dashboard, admins can set up automated workflows for quarantines, deletions and more, or view metrics like real-time and historical PII count by type.

Nightfall offers pretuned PII detectors out of the box that can spot things like compromising keys in GitHub repositories, credit card numbers, names, locations, phone numbers, Social Security numbers and even cryptocurrency wallet addresses. Exposed through an API and a software development kit, Madan claims that Nightfall’s data classification tech can be applied to just about app or service.

“[We’ve] launched partnerships with Snyk, Cribl, Virtru, Hanzo and more to expand our partner capabilities by embedding Nightfall’s detection capabilities into their offerings,” Madan said. “Organizations today manage high volumes of sensitive data, spanning credentials and passwords, PII, protected health information, and much more … [With Nightfall, they can] take action on sensitive data at a granular level, get full context on violations, and automate response, coaching end-users to fix issues or self-remediate.”

Potential Nightfall customers might be put off by the platform’s data policy, which permits Nightfall to use their data to “continually improve [its] data classification algorithms.” Meanwhile, employees might be concerned about the surveillance potential; one of the use cases Nightfall advertises on its website is scanning chat tools (e.g. Slack) for disallowed content.

The company suggests its platform can limit toxicity and profanity, but algorithms historically haven’t done a great job at this. More problematically, Nightfall promotes “insider threat” prevention features that could in theory be used to target whistleblowers.

During the pandemic, various forms of workplace monitoring came into wider use — enabled by the transition to remote and hybrid work setups. One market research company estimates that 60% of large enterprises now have some kind of tool to track workers remotely. Employees have pushed back, however. According to a 2021 ExpressVPN survey, close to a majority believe that monitoring software — which is largely legal in the U.S. — is a violation of trust and would consider quitting a company that used it.

Nightfall AI

Image Credits: Nightfall AI

Madan didn’t respond directly to a question about employee privacy. But he claims companies have the choice of not sharing any data with Nightfall; those that do can request that their data be deleted.

“Given the sheer volume of data and the rapid growth in the number of cloud applications in the enterprise, data sprawl is pervasive, and getting worse,” Madan said. “The shift to a hybrid workplace has eroded the traditional perimeter, and organizations must focus on applications and services in their environment that house sensitive data — their crown jewels.”

While Nightfall competes against well-funded startups including NetskopeVery Good Security and Bitglass in the multibillion-dollar data loss prevention market, the company has managed to attract customers including Klaviyo, UserTesting and Rightway and “hundreds” of others since its founding. The private sector makes up the whole of Nightfall’s current customer base, but Madan said that he’s “open” to government and military clients in the future — reflecting the money to be made from cybersecurity in the defense industry.

When reached for comment via email, Bain Capital Ventures partner and Nightfall board member Enrique Salem said: “Data security is quickly becoming the most critical and vulnerable layer of an organization’s security stack. Nightfall is the emerging leader in cloud DLP, protecting organizations from costly data leaks and enabling strong data security hygiene without blocking business users.”

To date, Nightfall — which is based in San Francisco — has raised $60 million in funding and scanned over 40 million “sensitive data findings,” Madan added.

Microsoft makes further cuts focused on consumer R&D group

After pulling open roles across its Office and Windows divisions and letting go of a portion of its 180,000-person workforce in July, Microsoft made additional cuts this week. This layoff round was concentrated in its Modern Life Experiences (MLX) group, one of the groups responsible for customer-focused project R&D at the company. According to posts on LinkedIn, the recent layoffs also impacted contracted recruiters across several locations, including Chicago.

It’s unclear how many employees were let go. When reached for comment, a Microsoft spokesperson declined to provide details but didn’t deny that the layoffs had occurred.

Spread across cities, including Vancouver and San Francisco, Microsoft’s MLX group came to be through the company’s 2015 acquisition of Mobile Data Labs, the company behind MileIQ, which at the time was one of the most popular mileage-tracking apps for getting deductions and reimbursements. After spending several years fine-tuning MileIQ under Microsoft, the team expanded its focus, partnering with Microsoft’s Family Safety group to build the first version of the Family Safety apps for iOS and Android.

An executive shuffle in February 2020 put Eran Megiddo, CVP of Windows Product and Education, at the head of both MLX and Microsoft’s Education group. Former Mobile Data Labs CTO Max Wheeler, who joined Microsoft following the acquisition, remained — and still remains — a director of engineering.

In June 2020, the MLX group launched Money in Excel, a template that let Excel users automatically connect bank, credit card, investment, and loan accounts to Excel to receive personalized insights. (Money in Excel is scheduled to be shut down on June 30, 2023, according to a support article.) The team was also responsible for incubating “innovative new customer experiences” for families across Windows, Xbox, mobile, and the web, according to a relevant job posting.

At one time, MLX was part of a broader effort within Microsoft to win back consumers by focusing on “prosumer” products and services, including family-oriented services. In rapid succession, Microsoft introduced a “Kids Mode” for Edge and consumer-centric Teams functionality, as well as personal subscriptions for Microsoft 365. A cross-functional group, Modern Life Planning was charged with working on the pricing, strategy, partnerships and acquisitions to further expand the consumer business.

Whether the MLX group layoffs signal a shift in strategy is an open question. But what is clear is that Microsoft didn’t deliver on expectations in its most recent fiscal quarter, facing the dual headwinds of falling consumer demand and PC production slowdowns.

“As we manage through this period, we will continue to invest in future growth while maintaining intense focus on operational excellence and execution discipline,” said Microsoft CFO Amy Hood during the company’s Q4 2022 earnings in July.

Google Cloud announces upcoming regions in Malaysia, Thailand and New Zealand

Fresh off of an expansion to Mexico, Google today previewed the launch of new Google Cloud regions concentrated in Asia-Pacific (APAC), specifically Malaysia, Thailand and New Zealand. When they come online, they’ll bring Google’s total number of cloud regions to 34 — short of Azure’s more than 60 but ahead of AWS’ 26.

In the context of cloud computing, a region is a specific geographic location where users can deploy cloud resources. At a minimum, all Google Cloud regions offer services including Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Storage, Persistent Disk, CloudSQL, Virtual Private Cloud, Key Management System, Cloud Identity and Secret Manager. Additional products usually come online within six months of a new region’s launch.

In a blog post, Google cites data from IDC projecting that total spending on cloud services in APAC (excluding Japan) will reach $282 billion by 2025. Other research agrees. According to a 2021 survey from Information Services Group, cloud services accounted for more than 84% of APAC’s IT and business services spending in Q3 2021 — by far the greatest percentage of any region.

AWS is also eyeing the opportunity, having recently outlined a two-year plan to set up cloud zones in Auckland, Manila, Bangkok and elsewhere in APAC. Google Cloud’s move would appear to be a shot across the bow.

“The new Google Cloud regions will help to address organizations’ increasing needs in the area of digital sovereignty and enable more opportunities for digital transformation and innovation in APAC,” Google Cloud’s Daphne Chung said in a statement. “With this announcement, Google Cloud is providing customers with more choices in accessing capabilities from local cloud regions while aiding their journeys to hybrid and multicloud environments.”

Google Cloud’s continued growth comes as it fights for dominance in the ultra-competitive — and potentially lucrative — cloud computing market. Flexera’s latest State of the Cloud report shows Google Cloud several percentage points behind AWS and Azure in terms of usage and adoption. But on the other hand, Google Cloud surpassed $6 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time in Q2 2022, signaling resilience.